Deputy Officer Iklix Varn (Human)

Everything on the kit list was in the bag, and Varn had checked it twice on the spoke car, which was one more time than the list needed and one fewer than the Deputy did.

The list was short. Service dress, two sets. The rank tab, three bars, seated at the collar by the quartermaster before Varn left the Academy and not to be moved by anyone else. A reader. A torch that the reader made unnecessary and the list kept anyway. Boots for grating. A copy of the posting order, printed, because a posting order on a reader is a posting order until the reader fails. Nothing on the list said what the posting was for. Varn had read the order standing up on the dock, and it said fold-approach watch, Eden Space Habitat, under Field Officer Smith, and gave a hatch number, and that was all it gave.

The spoke car let Varn off on the ring, and the ring was a habitat. That was the first thing. Varn had been taught what a Class I Fold-Proximate Research Platform was and had arrived expecting to see one, and what there was to see was a corridor with a floor that curved gently away in both directions, and doors, and people going through them with bags of their own. A child went past on something with wheels. Nobody looked at the tab. On the Compact side of the ring, Varn had been told, the tab was a courtesy; here, on the fold-approach side, it was a rank, and the difference was invisible from the corridor.

The hatch had its number and nothing else. It was not set apart. It sat between a door with a name on it and a door with a plant outside it, and two residents walked past it while Varn stood there, and neither of them looked at it, and Varn understood that they had never looked at it, and that this was not neglect. It was the posting's whole design. Varn knocked, which was wrong, and then used the handle, which was right.

The compartment was longer than it was wide and lit evenly from nowhere in particular. A rack of sealed grey housings ran the length of one wall, each with one small light on it, and the lights were all the same colour. A desk. A log. A Field Officer standing at the desk with four bars at her collar, who looked up and said, "Varn," as a fact, and then, "Smith," as another, and did not offer a hand because there was nothing in the doctrine about hands.

She said the thing Varn would later understand she said to every one of them.

"The event has not come in my tenure." She said it flatly, as a fact about the posting, and Varn heard that it was not a comfort and was not meant as one, and waited for the rest of it, and there was no rest of it. It was the job.

Then she showed the Deputy the job, which took less time than the kit list had.

Six instruments, cross-correlated, each reading the approach on a different principle so that no one fault could fool all of them. Every ninety seconds they filed their agreement with each other into a log. Nobody on the watch read that log. The instruments read it themselves, and if they ever stopped agreeing, the watch would know before anyone could have read anything. Varn looked at the six small lights, which had not changed while she was speaking, and asked nothing, because the question that had come to mind was then what do we do, and a Deputy does not ask that on the first day of a posting whose answer is standing in front of them.

"The watch does not watch anything," Smith said. She had seen the question anyway. "It stands here. It is the nearest qualified officer to the event if the event comes. That is the entire posting. Everything else is paperwork about the entire posting." She turned back to the desk. "Stand where you like."

Varn stood one step further from the desk than there was any reason to stand, and the first shift began, and the lights stayed the same colour, and that was what happened.